Voices in the Wardrobe

by Marlys Millhiser

  “I’m not letting you out of my sight anyway, Mom. You go up there, I’m going up there.”

  “Libby, there are government officials up there who think it was you who broke the code on the message accidently sent to my computer and not Doug. Think about it. They don’t seem to need much justification for hauling people off without giving them a chance for legal counsel these days. You could just disappear instead of graduate you know, not to mention all the parties you’d miss.”

  “I promised Grandma I wouldn’t leave you alone till she got here. Besides, they only do that to Middle Eastern types.”

  “Yeah,” Keegan said. “What could you do if they handcuffed your knees?”

  Charlie was still trying to figure out how to detain her daughter here in Del Mar so she could go up to the Sea Spa at the Marina del Sol when her phone tinkled in her purse.

  “Charlie,” Deputy Gordy Solomon said, “we’ve looked everywhere, every crook, cranny, crevice, cottage, and closet. We didn’t find a trace of Ms. Ridgeway or any of the others. I’m sorry.”

  Thirty

  “So, who all is ‘we?’ You said ‘we didn’t find anybody.’”

  “Deputy Saucier and myself, the VanZants, remaining staff.”

  “That’s a lot of area to search that fast.”

  “Well, there’s also the federal officials you met yesterday,” Solomon said.

  “And the satellite in the sky that traces cell phones.”

  “I don’t know anything about that, Charlie.”

  “One thing you do know. When you showed me Dashiell’s body, you said if Maggie was alive she was in worse trouble than before. What did that mean?”

  “Simply meant that she was the last person seen with him alive. She didn’t have a car, he didn’t have a license or a car because of his drug background. She was also dependent on drugs. They got to the Sea Spa from the Islandia. Obviously, neither were stable. She could have been responsible for his death as well as the others.”

  “Somebody else could have driven them both. So why is Luella missing too?”

  “I have no idea. Perhaps she drove them in her car which ended up in the drink.”

  “She was also Judith Judd’s agent and had access to much of her private as well as public financial information. Ask the Feds and the VanZants about Arthur Douglas, Redux, and Royal Pharmaca and Dr. Judy. Watch for reactions. This is much bigger than you and me, Gordy, Maggie, Luella, and Dashiell Hammett, Raoul Segundo or Grant Howard.”

  “Ever noticed Dr. Judy’s picture right next to the Redux display at Long’s Drugs? Rite Aid too I think,” Keegan Monroe asked the atmosphere in general or maybe the ozone. “Been seeing that probably six months anyway. Just now connecting her to the murdered one.”

  Charlie broke into whatever Gordy Solomon was saying to keep her away from the Spa. “Oh, ask around up there about Judith Judd’s picture appearing in the Redux ad at Long’s and Rite Aid for the last six months while you’re at it.”

  “So, are we going up there? Or not?” Libby ordered another beer in defiance. Well, that’s how she came about—a six pack and a dare.

  “I might. You are not. I don’t care what you promised your grandma. I’m almost getting up the nerve to call Mitch back. Doesn’t sound like the satellite tracking thing works that well, like Doug said.”

  Mitch’s voice mail asked her to leave a message. She did. It was, “You okay?”

  “You know, Mom, I just thought of something. How come they can trace people calling from plane or hiking or skiing accidents by tracing their cells?”

  “Why couldn’t you have thought of that before I returned his call? Maybe you have to be calling 911.”

  “Isn’t it interesting how little we know of the technology we depend on so completely?” Keegan Monroe said, pulling out his little pocket spiral notepad and presumably writing down that authorial thought.

  “You tried a PDA?” Brodie Caulfield whipped out his. “It’s a cell too, all in one, even a camera.”

  “Brodie, my life and career are complicated to the max the way it is. I do not desire yet another gadget that I do not understand.” He stared off into the artificially lighted potted plant life tossing animated shadows in the increasing sea breeze that wafted uphill from the Pacific. The breeze still carried the scent of rain if not the reality.

  Libby and Brodie disappeared for a few minutes, returning with shrimp and bowls of creamed spinach and cheese dip for all and other fattening grazing goodies Charlie couldn’t identify. Sirens screamed by on the Pacific Highway. No one in Charlie’s line of vision even paused at the sound. After this morning it would take a whole lot to make a credible emergency in Del Mar. Great time for terrorists to blow up something with no one paying attention.

  Just as Charlie pulled the Ram out of the parking garage, her cell beckoned. It was Mitch returning her call. He was at the Spa.

  “I’m on my way. What’s going on up there?”

  “I’m not sure. But don’t drive up into the lot. Park down at the marina. I’ll call Sidney, the steward, to drive you up just below the crest and drop you off. I’ll meet you there. And, Charlie, don’t bring anybody.”

  He hung up before she could explain the Libby problem. Or how long it would take her to get there. Seemed odd he didn’t ask, hung up so suddenly. She had visions of him being tied down and forced to say what he was told. At least he didn’t sound drugged. And what the hell had happened to Kenny Cowper? She didn’t have his cell number in the memory, but she did have it. Somewhere. Rush hour traffic again, and constant tourist traffic, and beach bum traffic. Where could Mitch be waiting forever, not knowing how long it would take?

  How long could Keegan and Brodie keep Libby from jumping in her Jeep and heading for the Sea Spa? Short of hog-tying her? That could be dangerous for all three of them. Brodie was strong enough to subdue her long enough to tie her up. She really shouldn’t be asking her friends to do any of this. They could end up in jail for attempted sexual abuse or something. And her mother was flying in tomorrow. Now all Charlie needed was to run out of gas. What if her stopping at the Marina del Sol was a trap?

  She couldn’t find Kenny’s number but was pretty sure she remembered it now and punched it at the next stop sign. Through all this she kept seeing Maggie’s face in the old days when it was perky and mischievous and sharp and funny. And Luella’s half-lidded look with one eyebrow raised slightly that told you the battery on her bullshit detector was fully charged. Funny how you don’t appreciate the little things until you think it’s too late.

  Heads up, Greene. You can’t see anything through tears. You decided to venture out here, ignore all the warnings. You either get strong or turn the truck around and control your daughter yourself.

  “This is Kenneth. Charlie? Where are you? I thought you were dead.”

  “Where are you?”

  If any satellite was tracing her phone calls it must not know where she was or everyone wouldn’t be asking where she was. Wouldn’t there be a lot more important legal deviants it would be using its time looking for?

  “I’m at the marina—they won’t let my car out the gate.”

  “Well you walk through and around the curve out of sight and I’ll pick you up. I’m maybe ten, fifteen minutes away.”

  “Then what do we do?”

  I haven’t the foggiest. “Tell you when I see you.”

  “Jesus, I’m glad somebody knows what’s going on.” He sounded so relieved she wanted to laugh. No, maybe cry.

  This was all suspiciously easy. He was waiting for her when she got there. She drove into a residential cul-de-sac, turned off the engine, and leaned back against the headrest. “I want to know what’s happened—no bullshit, no macho—just the facts. I don’t care what happened between you and Mitch. Kenny, I want to know what’s happened to Maggie and Luella. Focus for me, okay?”

  Two little boys chased each other, one with a toy rake, the other a toy shovel on a tiny front lawn. Two cats squ
ared off in the middle of the street.

  If Mitch had hurt him, none of the damage showed. Dark half-moons showed under his eyes though, the rest of his face a little gaunt. If she remembered correctly he was a year or two younger than she, but in the current light she could see an occasional gray hair hiding among its short dark cousins. She wondered if there were any in hers. She’d had a couple a few years back and plucked them, hadn’t seen any since.

  The guard and his dog at the Marina del Sol would not let him take his car out of the gate because he had no pass for getting it in there.

  “So you just drove off after I left?”

  “No, I scuffled with your inflated manfriend awhile and then drove my rental down to the marina and hiked back to see what was transpiring up there. By that time it was light and so I wandered around the grounds. Most of the activity was down by the earthquake crack or along the path to it. I stayed out of sight near the buildings where they had to walk by—the trio of government guys that tried to grill us last night, a female deputy, couple of staff women. Finally crawled onto a dusty couch in one of those cabins and slept for a couple of hours.”

  “What were they doing?”

  “Talking on their cells mostly. Sheriff’s department all but disappeared. I figured everybody was looking for you and Libby and I was going to hang around if they brought you back. And finally I thought why would they do that? And also got hungry so I hiked back down to the marina. Didn’t have any trouble buying food at the restaurant but my car was parked illegally because I wasn’t a member or something.”

  “Did you try to call me?”

  “No, I was worried I’d help them trace you. So I lounged around the dock, watched CNN in the bar. That’s when I figured out what had happened to the sheriff’s department. They’d had prior orders from another part of the government to participate in the Emergency Response Drill and nobody in the bureaucracy ever talks to anybody else in the bureaucracy if they can help it so—”

  “We watched part of it in a parking lot in Del Mar. It was a hoot. Kenny, I got a call from Luella this afternoon. She said she was in the cottages. And she said ‘we.’ I’m hoping that means Maggie is still alive and they’re together. She sounded drunk or drugged so I’m not positive that’s what she said. I’ve had a call from Detective Solomon who says he’s back up there now too. He insists I stay away from the Spa. I’ve talked to Mitch who says to park down at the marina and have the steward from the Motherfricker, that’s a yacht he’ll be shooting on in a few days, drop me off just below the crest of the promontory where he, Mitch, will meet me. And I have connived to get Brodie Caulfield and Keegan Monroe to forcibly restrain Libby Abigail Greene from coming up to the Spa as she has threatened to do because she has promised her grandmother she wouldn’t let me out of her sight until said grandmother arrives at LAX sometime tomorrow.”

  After a long pause and a longer stretch, a deep yawn, a shake of the head, Kenneth Cooper/Kenny Cowper blinked his black eyes at her black eyes and said, “That’s what I’ve always liked about women—they lead such simple straightforward lives. But having met Edwina, having your mom here is not that bad an idea.”

  “And the call from Mitch sounded funny. If he were being forced to have me be picked up down at the marina so I wouldn’t get up there to begin with—I don’t know—but there was something funny about that call.”

  “You really sure you were talking to Mitch Hilsten there?” Kenny said in Mitch’s voice. “See, he’s famous enough to be mimicked pretty easy, sweet little Charlie. And you’re hearing this from an amateur at mimicking.”

  Thirty-One

  “So you figure they’re going to be waiting for you just below the crest of the cliff top?”

  “Either that, or down at the marina where I was to leave the truck. Or it was Mitch waiting to meet me there like he said.” She kept a pair of crummy running shoes in the truck for emergencies she never had. Until now, maybe.

  “Might have known any woman who’d drive a Ram would pack sensible shoes. Stands to reason.” But Kenny shook his head in bewilderment to negate his words.

  They’d parked the Ram in a construction zone located several cul-de-sacs closer to their destination than their first stop and where a modest home, in the process of being scraped off its lot by a bulldozer, hunkered injured among several trucks, machines, piles of debris that overflowed onto the street. The mostly open lot gave them access to a social trail snaking up the side of the promontory for a way at least. Best they could do without knowing the lay of the land.

  “I still don’t know what you think we can do if your daughter shows up. Or what we can do about anything, frankly.”

  “Do you want to just turn around and go back? Well, go.” She slipped her wallet and keys in her pocket, stuffed her purse under the seat. Her neck ached again. This time the weather change was for real.

  “No Charlie, I want to know what the plan is.”

  “The plan is to sneak around any welcoming committee waiting on the crest of the whatever-it-is and the main building of the Spa to the cottages behind it and rescue Maggie and Luella.”

  “Oh well, that’s easy. Why didn’t you say so? One little problem I can think of though is that there’s no cover. Unless we crawled on our stomachs and then—”

  “Kenny, that’s a wonderful idea. Why didn’t I think of it?”

  “I was being either vacuous or facetious. Man, I’m too tired to sort out which.”

  “I really do appreciate your doing this.” She put an arm around his waist, which with the uneven terrain and his height was a stretch. “Tell you what, we get out of this all right, I’ll give you a massage.”

  “I’m holding you to that, Greene.”

  “I know.” The climb was getting serious. He was in shape and she wasn’t. That wind in Del Mar had followed her and tried now to push her over. So much for sensible shoes. Charlie finally called a rest stop—a real bruise to her ego but it took her three steps to match one of his. “Get down, way down, flat. Now.”

  “I’m not really in the mood for my massage right—”

  “No, I think I see someone.” A big rock would have been nice. But there weren’t any. There was someone walking toward them though, and in a crouch.

  It was Mitch. And the closer he came the angrier he looked. “What the hell you two doing? Charlie, I thought you were meeting Sidney down at the marina. You didn’t say anything about bringing him.”

  “Trying to sneak onto the Spa property without being seen,” Kenny said with a touch of sneer-like tone. “What are you doing?”

  “Waiting for Charlie. Saw you guys for miles. What the fuck stupid trick is this, Steeplehead?”

  “Sorry you’re so vertically challenged, Hilsten.” That sudden draining of all expression in the black eyes, the flattening of voice tone men exhibit when they’re recharging the testosterone level in preparation to do something stupid. The world would be a lot less interesting without men but it would make a lot more sense.

  “Now stop that,” she ordered, but wasn’t about to step between them. “How did you expect to get me in there without being seen if I’d been dropped off by Sidney?”

  “By approaching the Spa from the other direction. There’s a lot more cover.”

  “We’d have to cross the road.” Kenny straightened taller, just to rub it in. “You know the terrain over there?”

  “Houses, backyards, dogs, and cul-de-sacs. Better than crossing the promontory, wide open to all the big-view windows of the main building.”

  A very temporary truce evolved and they took off for the road heading up to the Sea Spa, pausing before crossing it to let Charlie catch her breath—another grudge she had against guys. No sign of Mitch’s rental, the wind building even here, but no official types peering down at them that Charlie could see. Suddenly, they were in a neighborhood on a path along a dry drainage ditch lined with rocks and then on a sidewalk. Mitch led them down a street to a cross street and then up another
cul-de-sac where his black rental was parked. He motioned them inside and drove to the end of the cross street—where it dead ended at a permanent concrete barrier, on the other side of which jagged a ditch filled with deep darkness instead of water. It meandered downhill out of sight and uphill it made a cut through the cliff top where sunlight spilled through like in a religious movie.

  Charlie stood looking up at that inspirational beacon, feeling distressingly creepy.

  “You made it this far, Charlie. This last little bit shouldn’t be all that difficult.” Mitch Hilsten had some bruising under and along to the side of one eye.

  “I could carry you,” Kenny offered.

  “I know.” Charlie turned around so they could see her tears—part actress, part overwhelmed responsible person here—before they could make their own remarks into a reason to strike out at each other. “I’m just so afraid of what I might find up there.”

  Whoa, we’re not too manipulative here.

  “Yeah, but it’s for their own good.”

  “What’s for who’s own good? Oh—” Kenny shrugged, embarrassed for her.

  “Well, she’s under a lot of stress.”

  “I know that, Hilsten.”

  “Okay, I’m ready to go up there now. This is really serious stuff here. I wish you guys would grow up.”

  “Well, you’re the one talking to yourself.”

  “Are you intimating Charlie’s losing it, Cow-per?” Mitch did his highly offended rage thing.

  “See you guys later. I have more important things to deal with right now. Like life and death?” Charlie took off at a pace faster than she could ever maintain, hoping anger and dread would give her the extra energy the cocktail hour in Del Mar had not. She was halfway to the divine light when a firecracker, car backfire, or gunshot sounded above her. She couldn’t tell how long surprise stopped her in her tracks before the males in the trio had raced up behind her and flattened her to the ground.